Diablo III Options

[phlapjack77]

I think, in all this "discussion", that most people (including me), realize we're not going to change anything - D3 is what it is.

Having said that, to me, their motivation does matter. This change doesn't appear to be a "responding to customer demand" change. This change appears to be a "Spaceballs 2: The search for more money^*, our customers wishes be damned."

^*Yes yes, I know companies exist to make money.

[StealthSigma]

No, I'm just taking it as given for the discussion. Like I said, I only played Open (and 95% offline) myself. Their motivation really doesn't matter, though. Whoever wanted it, the system is fundamentally designed around a secure system w/ AH, which includes major server-side processing and requires online play. Given that fact, a) you can't just 'enable' offline-only play, and b) hackers are everyone's problem. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I'm saying you can argue that these are *bad* motivations and bad decisions, and/or that it's all Blizzard's *fault*, but A and B are still true.

Regarding D3, what's the deal with Thorns? Why do they keep including this wholly worthless power? Even in D2, it was still wholly worthless, and there were a lot more ways to leverage the effect (auras and things). I can only assume there's one dev who just loves it and they're afraid to sadden him.

Thorns may be annoyingly weak but it at least has AN effect at lv60. Seeing as how Lv55+ gear can be decent for inferno, nothing is more frustrating than getting +xp gear on what you're using in Inferno.

[Yerameyahu]

Ha, true. There are actually several effects that do 'nothing', but that one is at least literal.

Thorns, though, is not useful at any level. At the very lowest levels, things have little enough HP that it could hurt them (probably not kill them), but you don't need it then. You're already killing them easily, because all of Normal is 'No Fail Tutorial' difficulty.

Moving forward, suffix balance is probably the issue that bothers me the most. Life leech, which was basically mandatory in D2, is all but useless in D3 (maybe that's a good thing, but still). % chance to Stun/Chill/etc. is not bad, but tends to be a very low percentage. And so on. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It's not a huge problem, but it pokes me every time I find an item.

[Bigity]

Real Money Auction House is up. Wonder if I can make enough to pay for my WoW subscribtion and basically play both games for free.

[Yerameyahu]

I've only sold like 4 things in the gold one so far. There really is nothing in the AH below level 50. I'm not wild about the fact that the game *starts* at level 60/Inferno. I preferred D2's 'unattainable' 99. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[StealthSigma]

Ha, true. There are actually several effects that do 'nothing', but that one is at least literal.

Thorns, though, is not useful at any level. At the very lowest levels, things have little enough HP that it could hurt them (probably not kill them), but you don't need it then. You're already killing them easily, because all of Normal is 'No Fail Tutorial' difficulty.

Moving forward, suffix balance is probably the issue that bothers me the most. Life leech, which was basically mandatory in D2, is all but useless in D3 (maybe that's a good thing, but still). % chance to Stun/Chill/etc. is not bad, but tends to be a very low percentage. And so on. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) It's not a huge problem, but it pokes me every time I find an item.

On the other hand, IAS, as expected is ridiculous. It's bad that Magic rings with IAS are better than any possible rare ring that does not have IAS. I have a legendary bracer that is okay but not great, but since it has 8% IAS it provides a huge boost to my DPS compared to anything else I could put in the slot.

[Yerameyahu]

They're fixing IAS in the next patch, though. Yes, it's crazy good now.

[StealthSigma]

They're fixing IAS in the next patch, though. Yes, it's crazy good now.

Which is annoying.

[Yerameyahu]

Annoying that it's crazy good? Yes, the ideal is definitely balance in all things. Annoying that they're patching? *shrug* Constant balance tweaks are now the norm for games, be they MMO, FPS, whatever. I'm pretty fine with it (within reason, obviously). Given that we can't go back in time, I'd rather they keep making progress… than no progress. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[StealthSigma]

Annoying that it's crazy good? Yes, the ideal is definitely balance in all things. Annoying that they're patching? *shrug* Constant balance tweaks are now the norm for games, be they MMO, FPS, whatever. I'm pretty fine with it (within reason, obviously). Given that we can't go back in time, I'd rather they keep making progress… than no progress. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

It's annoying in the sense the this "balance" is probably going to end up with the opposite effect of what they're intending to do with inferno, which is to lower the difficulty gap between Act I and Act II.

[Yerameyahu]

Presumably they're doing multiple things. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) You'd think it wouldn't be *that* hard to make everything stop one-shotting everyone. It wouldn't have kill them to make Normal, NM, and Hell challenging either. At the very least, they could just give things more HP; everything I meet in the game is either dead in 1 hit, 3 hits, or … oh-god-TPK-x5.

[Tanegar]

For those of us who A) don't have D3 yet and B) don't obsess over statistical minutiae, what's IAS?

[StealthSigma]

For those of us who A) don't have D3 yet and B) don't obsess over statistical minutiae, what's IAS?

Increased Attack Speed.

The primary reason Blizzard doesn't like is the resources that have generation based on making hits and specifically Hatred generation for Demon Hunters. It's pretty bad when a Monk can spam Mantra of Healing to keep up the elevated HP regen without running out of spirit because of attack speed except for the fact that this is the sort of junk you have to pull to survive on Inferno.

What they should do, rather than nerfing IAS, is to change how resource generation works and make it a X/second cap on generation that way IAS helps resource generation, to a point, before no longer helping it or do some sort of diminishing returns. IAS would still be very valuable as a damage increase, it just wouldn't be as broken for Demon Hunters as current.

[Yerameyahu]

Of course, IAS was a huge deal in D2 as well. It's even more so in D3 currently, though.

[StealthSigma]

Of course, IAS was a huge deal in D2 as well. It's even more so in D3 currently, though.

I find it a necessary part to survive inferno as a monk but meh. I went the resistance stacking route and I didn't have enough gold to support buying equipment for every slot that had +All Resistances and +X Resistance where X is the same on each piece. Best I got was 52% resists overall with 50k HP and I was getting murdered in Act I.

I switched to IAS and instead of getting murdered by trash I was able to go toe to toe. Elite and Champion packs still kicked my butt though...

[X-Kalibur]

Of course, IAS was a huge deal in D2 as well. It's even more so in D3 currently, though.

Unless you play a wizard in D3, where IAS is not only more or less worthless (unless you use signature spells) but it causes you to eat up AP faster with ray spells. Of course, all most wizards do is run around spamming blizzard and hydra anyway, neither of which benefit at all from IAS... unless you want to cast them that fraction of a second faster.

[Yerameyahu]

Interesting, they chose not to use IAS in any of those spells? That's kind of odd. You'd think the blizzard would just snow faster, the ray would 'ping' more often, and the hydra would spit faster.

Either way: IAS is currently even more important in D3 than it already was D2… if you're the 4 other classes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I wasn't saying it's not (for monks), and I didn't know about those exceptions for wizards.

[X-Kalibur]

Interesting, they chose not to use IAS in any of those spells? That's kind of odd. You'd think the blizzard would just snow faster, the ray would 'ping' more often, and the hydra would spit faster.

Either way: IAS is currently even more important in D3 than it already was D2… if you're the 4 other classes. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I wasn't saying it's not (for monks), and I didn't know about those exceptions for wizards.

The rays MIGHT tick faster, but on inferno I generally have just enough time to drop hydra (not affected), Blizzard (also not affected) and maybe a single tick from ice ray. The spectrazards, before they nerfed force armor, made good use of IAS, however.

[nezumi]

I think, in all this "discussion", that most people (including me), realize we're not going to change anything - D3 is what it is.

Like I said, it won't be long before someone figures out how to hack it, even if it's only for an 'offline' mode. This game is too popular for it not to happen, and setting up a server is sufficiently trivial that I don't think it'll be a real road block.

[StealthSigma]

Like I said, it won't be long before someone figures out how to hack it, even if it's only for an 'offline' mode. This game is too popular for it not to happen, and setting up a server is sufficiently trivial that I don't think it'll be a real road block.

I doubt it. WoW is a perfect demonstration of why it will be a long time and nowhere near what the real game offers. In fact, most private WoW servers are quite imperfect and the first ones had tons of things missing.

People want to play Diablo 3 now, not in a year, and certainly not a crappy version of it.

[nezumi]

Diablo 3 is not WoW. A lot of people are still playing D3 in single-player only. I don't think you CAN play WoW single-player. What I'm waiting for isn't a 'play online with your friends' D3. What I'm expecting is I set up some virtual server that just saves my character to dark corner of my hard disc, and when I boot up the game it runs. Just like my (functional) version of Starcraft 2, and my (functional) version of GTA IV, which are both hacked because the legitimate version crapped out when my Internet hiccuped.

[Yerameyahu]

Sounds pretty suspect, but whatever. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[StealthSigma]

Diablo 3 is not WoW. A lot of people are still playing D3 in single-player only. I don't think you CAN play WoW single-player. What I'm waiting for isn't a 'play online with your friends' D3. What I'm expecting is I set up some virtual server that just saves my character to dark corner of my hard disc, and when I boot up the game it runs. Just like my (functional) version of Starcraft 2, and my (functional) version of GTA IV, which are both hacked because the legitimate version crapped out when my Internet hiccuped.

No one is playing Diablo 3 single player. There exists no such thing. They are playing Diablo 3 and set up barriers so that it appears like they are playing it single player.

Diablo 3 is WoW for the purpose of this argument. Diablo 3, unlike Starcraft 2, has server side code that is required to play the game. Starcraft 2, as it was released, had a single player game embedded in it that just required you to authenticate once to Blizzard and stay up to date to play it. All the data, code, and necessary files to run Starcraft 2 are already on your computer. Starcraft 2 only required that the mandatory one time login to battle.net (to prove authenticity) and updates are disabled in order to create the hacked version that you use. That is a far cry from what is required to make a single player version of Diablo 3.

Diablo 3, like WoW, has significant amounts of code that is server side. Essentially everything important is server side with the Diablo 3 client acting as nothing more than an install that contains all the pretties for running game. All of this code must be reverse engineered, which is no small feat. That is while I say it can take a year or more before there's a hacked single player version of Diablo 3 and why I say it will suck when it is released. It is because of this server side code that Blizzard is able to significantly cut down on hacking. It permits them to check and see if the client side cache has been altered (neon sign indication of a hack). To "hack" a single player of Diablo 3 will require significant amounts of playtime datamining data that comes from the server to try to reverse engineer that code. Guess what. That whole process needs to be repeated for each and every content patch or expansion pack.

[nezumi]

Diablo 3, like WoW, has significant amounts of code that is server side. Essentially everything important is server side with the Diablo 3 client acting as nothing more than an install that contains all the pretties for running game.

What is your source for this? Because my understanding is that, after the authentication (and update process), the content stored online is your social media account and your character. Are you suggesting that things like the game levels are run *solely* on the server, and so functions like monster-generation, etc. are handled server-side and all I am running on the client is image and sound rendering? Because that sounds crazy resource intensive, especially if you want things like say, cool graphics and smooth action (for your single-player experience).

[almost normal]

No one is playing Diablo 3 single player. There exists no such thing.

Like most broad sweeping statements, That's completely false.